[paulwilky76]

Hello, can anyone recommend me a good place to purchase an external hard drive for backing up my music. I've got about 30 or 40 full dvd-rs worth of music and I'm beginning to get a bit worried that my dvds will probably start failing in about 12months!!

I don't want something dodgy that's going to wipe my music after about 60secs. I want something thats of decent quality. I'm looking for around 500GB, perhaps Western Digital, or Seagate. Or can anyone recommend a better manufacturer and where to buy?

Thanks for any help provided!

P

[TaLL|dUdE]

if you really want to keep it safe. Get a Raid 1 enclosure at the least... or a Raid 5 would be better.

if you just use a single standalone drive and it fails... say goodbye to your files.

[discobay]

Bear in mind though that you will need to buy twice the space if you want raid level 1.

[HKNewBi]

paulwilky76

Avoid Lacie drives - I have had 4 fail in 6 months. And they don't honour their warranties either. That includes those brushed aluminium drives. I know they contain Seagate / WD etc but the drives cook and, in my experience, Seagate will replace if within 3 years.

You might know this but to explain:

Raid one is drive mirroring. So 2 drives, both identical. Therefore for 500GB of useable storage you would need 2 500GB drives.

Raid 5 is disk striping. You need a minimum of 3 disks. Two disks are to store data, the third disk is the parity disk. Don't worry about what this means but to have 500Gb of useable storage space you would need 3 250Gb drives. Ie two are the useable drives (hence 250gb x 2 = 500gb) and the third drive is the parity drive. It is more efficient than Raid 1 - ie 750 gb of drives gives you 500gb of useable space, whereas Raid 1, 1000Gb of drives gives you 500Gb of useable space.

In this example it would probably be cheaper to go for Raid 5 too.

[discobay]

Raid 0 is striping and Raid 1 is disk mirroring.

[HKNewBi]

Originally Posted by discobay

Raid 0 is striping and Raid 1 is disk mirroring.

Would you recommend Raid 0? I personally wouldn't as this is a fault tolerance question, not a performance question as I see it.

Would go for Raid 1 or Raid 5 (which to the pedant is a striped set with parity).

[paulwilky76]

Thanks for the information on raiding. I appreciate the explanations. I will look into it. Me and a friend were talking about life expectancy of dvds and he got me worrying actually, so want to limit risk of losing my music, and splash out on another hard drive. Thanks!